MSN AdCenter

Recently MSN opened it’s AdCenter Contextual Advertising program to signups for one day. So I figured ‘why not?’. Upon visiting the signup page using Mozilla Firefox I was greeted with an error that the page does not work in firefox (it doesn’t even work in Internet Explorer 7 either!). So, I launched IE6 and visited the same page.

I went through the steps until I came to a page asking for credit card details. In the previous steps I had entered my country as Ireland, but on the credit card details page it told me that Ireland was not recognised as a valid country for credit card use.

In a way I’m glad that I couldn’t go any further in the signup process, because it turns out there is a signup fee of $5. Now $5 isn’t a lot, but how come Google AdSense and YPN! don’t charge for signups?

All in all, I think MSN should have put more thought into the signup process before opening it to the public. I know it’s still in Beta, but I don’t feel that that’s a good enough excuse. Lots of Google services are in Beta too, but they work a lot better.